Friday, March 7, 2014

8 comments:

50s and 60s(!) for the next few days, but this Neverending Winter attacks again on Wednesday and Thursday, with more fucking snow possible. After that, it looks like Spring and normal temps will finally be here to stay, though.

55 today, and sunny. I'm thinking about taking a trip out to my favorite Delaware County hamburger stand for lunch (though leave those stupid tomatoes off my burgers, especially in winter!), heading out to Valley Forge for a bit, then having dinner at a Korean spot in Olney or Columbian or something along 5th Street on the way back home.

Sounds like a day!

Having some of Kensington's own Reanimator Coffee Dukunde Kawa Rwanda roast for breakfast right now. A good start to the weekend.

The only drawback to this plan is having to move my car, which currently happily sits in the spot right outside my front window for only the second time since I bought it three weeks ago.

Typically, I have to park two or three blocks away, but that's what I signed up for by having a car in the city. Oh, well, enjoying the weather takes precedence over convenient parking today, for me, especially this year.

Won't be moving it again after today until I leave for work at 5:15 Monday morning, so hopefully I can snag another spot at least somewhere on my own little block, when I get back tonight. We'll see, I guess!

Okay, I canceled Valley Forge and dinner in Olney, but I did head out to Charlie's for lunch. Took some pics and did a blog about it, like to read it here it go.

In related news, I now know what I must do with my blog. Turn it into a Roadside America / Americana photo journey kinda thing, mainly. That should be fun.

Be on the look out for my Philly Luncheonettes / Philly Lunch Counters blog soon, too. I love that dying breed of American eatery, but fortunately my own neighborhood, and the rest of the River Wards, still abound in them. I consider it my duty to document them all.

I love this kind of cultural history and studies. Will this also include diners?

I read a book about this awhile ago by a working academic historian who suggested that the rise of the luncheonette or diner in the United States in middle part of the twentieth-century suggested the rise of the American middle class and the fact that families who could not eat out during the Depression could now participate in an activity once above their finances.

Oh, and btw, ol' Jack Burton?

:O)

I love that movie!

Big Trouble!

Jack just wanted his truck back!

The funny thing is, I literally pondered the idea of putting it on today as just background for house puttering.

I think I'm gonna leave diners to the many others who cover those, especially with their being so many of them. There are dozens of books out there on just NJ diners alone. I'm thinking now that most people from outside the northeast probably don't see any distinction between diners and lunch counters? But there definitely is, even if I can't precisely put it into words myself. It's just something you feel. ;)

There are two lunch counters right down the street under the York-Dauphin El on Front Street that I'll start with, and then I'll hit a few more up Kensington Avenue toward Allegheny. Then head off into Port Richmond, which also has a few classic old lunch counters. That should keep me busy for a few months, at which point I'll head out into Delaware and Montgomery Counties and hit the luncheonettes on the frozen-in-time Main Streets in some of the small towns out that way. Photos of old store signage (I particularly love old Coca Cola and 7-Up signs) can go on the other blog.

I finally have a blog focus now, heh.

I hear there's still an automat somewhere in Manhattan? Or there was, until very recently. I stumbled across a few Horn & Hardart postcards somewhere not long ago, but I can't remember where now. Should have bought some when I had the chance.

Yeah, that sounds about right in the historic sense of 'lunch counter,' which is why I'm leaning towards using 'luncheonette' now. It was my understanding that the two terms (lunch counter and luncheonette) are interchangeable anymore, but you're correct that lunch counter is still associated with a Woolworth's-type setup in many minds.

As for diners, there's also the regional differences. A 'diner' to an Oregonian, say, probably conjures up more an image of the kinds of places I'm looking into documenting, a roadside truck stop coffee-shop type place with a dozen stools at a counter; while a 'diner' to a New Jerseyan means a larger place (often featuring plenty of stainless steel and neon) with mostly booths and tables and an eighteen-page menu featuring everything from all-day breakfast to steaks and lobster to pasta to four pages of sandwiches and two pages of Americanized Greek cuisine.

I don't really know of any Woolworth's-style lunch counters around here these days, but plenty of places with eight to twelve stools along a counter, a simple menu of simple foods mainly in the form of a small menu board on the wall above the grill that hasn't changed since 1974, and that small but real time warp feeling you don't even really get from diners or other types of older restaurants anymore these days.

The food isn't gonna blow you away, though sometimes it'll surprise you (and the selections, too - how many places still serve things like creamed chipped beef on toast these days? Philly-area luncheonettes, that's who!), and the coffee is generally to be avoided, at least in my opinion, but it's all about the ambiance and the history.

I've eaten at both luncheonettes on Front Street under the York-Dauphin El (and the bulletproof, yellow-signed American Chinese place / beer store as well, but those North Philadelphia staples are a different topic for another time!) that I plan to start with, and one of them actually had one of the better cheesesteaks I've had in the city. Nothing to go out of the way for, but a very solid neighborhood spot for when I'm in the mood for one of those. Kitty's Luncheonette in Port Richmond is the one I'm really looking forward to, though. Haven't been there yet, so I may just skip ahead and hit them first, possibly as early as this weekend.

Barack Obama on the so-called "Arab Spring" (May 19, 2011):

"There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat."

The "Arab Spring" was the brutal rise of political Islam in the Middle East and this is what Obama compares the Civil Rights Movement to?

The Fundamental Argument:

The progressive movement, and the activist base of the Democratic Party, creates and supports venues that demonize and defame the Jewish state, thereby also creating hatred toward the Jewish people.

Such venues include political journals, such as, but not limited to, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, and the UK Guardian, numerous universities throughout the United States and Europe, various NGOs with an anti-Israel agenda, and the entire progressive-left movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction (BDS) the Jewish people of the state of Israel.

These venues and organizations do not generally criticize Israel, but dehumanize that country.

For this reason, among others, the progressive movement, and the activist base of the Democratic Party, undermines the well-being and safety of Jews around the world, sometimes resulting in violence toward us.

Therefore, as a matter of common sense and basic human decency, Jews should leave the progressive movement and the Democratic Party as we seek to build alternative political structures that are not home to toxic anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, who would see us robbed of self-determination and self-defense.

What You Can't Discuss:

This is a partial list of taboo topics within progressive-left venues around the Arab-Israel conflict. You cannot discuss this material because it undermines the "Palestinian narrative" of perpetual victimhood. This narrative is a club used by the Arab and Muslim enemies of Israel, along with their western progressive allies, to delegitimize that country in preparation for its eventual dissolution.

1) The centuries of Jewish dhimmitude under the boot of Islamic imperialism.

2) The recent construction of Palestinian identity, its connection to Soviet Cold War politics, and how this is an Arab people with a Roman name that refers to Greeks.

3) Arab and Palestinian Koranically-based racism as the fundamental source of the conflict.

4) The ways in which contemporary progressive anti-Zionism serves as a cloak for gross anti-Semitism.

5) The Palestinian theft and appropriation of Jewish history.

6) "Pallywood."

7) The historical connections between the Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Palestinian national movement.

8) The perpetual refusal of the Palestinian-Arabs to accept a state for themselves in peace next to the Jewish one.

9) The progressive portrayal of terrorists as those fighting a righteous war of "resistance."

10) The Arab-Palestinian indoctrination of children with Jew hatred.

11) Human rights violations against women, children, and Gay people in the Muslim Middle East.

12) The fact that violent Jihadis call themselves "Jihadis" and claim to love death above life.

This is only a partial list, so please let us know the many more that we are missing.

Quote of the Whenever:

It is not that most progressives are anti-Semitic. They aren't. It's that they don't get it, they don't care, and they very much want you to shut the fuck up. - Michael Lumish